The networked computing environment (e.g., a cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Typically, cloud consumers interact with cloud environments (e.g., Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments) manually via user interface(s) and command line(s), or programmatically via application programming interfaces and individual resources. Challenges may exist, however, in that such approaches may not be optimal for being dynamically embedded/implemented in virtual machine images and/or tools (e.g., installation scripts, network tools, etc.) that are presently utilized in cloud environments. As such, existing approaches may be less efficient and/or less accurate.